Sam Biddle

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch—that's the guy in charge of technology at a very powerful and important technology company—is jumping ship, reportedly for Apple. Which is odd, because he's said a lot of mean, frustrated things about Apple!

Lynch has been with Adobe since 2005, meaning he was lined up against Steve Jobs when the two companies repeatedly clashed over little things like freedom, openness, and how much Flash sucks. It led to a lot of public comments that would suggest Lynch just doesn't like the way Apple operates. Awwww-wwwkward, as sayeth the tweens. All emphasis added.

"I just think there's this negative campaigning going on, and, for whatever reason, Apple is really choosing to incite it, and condone it," Lynch says. "I think that's unfortunate. We don't think it's good for the web to have aspects closed off—a blockade of certain types of expression. There's a decade of content out there that you just can't view on Apple's device, and I think that's not only hurtful to Adobe, but hurtful to everyone that created that content."

From an Adobe blog post about Flash:

"We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on [the iPhone and iPad] if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen,"

Another official Adobe post is pretty snippy and passive aggressive too!

We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
However, as we posted last week, given the legal terms Apple has imposed on developers, we have already decided to shift our focus away from Apple's iPhone and iPad devices for both Flash Player and AIR.

From the Web 2.0 Expo in 2010, as reported by WebMonkey:

"Apple's playing this strategy where they want to create a walled garden around what people use," Lynch continued.

He turned to an analogy he's used in the past: the development of railroads in the United States in the 1800s.

"Part of the competitive dynamic at that time was that people were using different gauge rails for each section of the route," he says. If you wanted to move your freight on somebody else's section of railroad, you had to unload everything and put it into different cars. The same cars couldn't run on different sections of the rail.

"That wasn't good for industry. The ‘gauge of rails' today is writing code for particular operating systems."

Of course, things change once Flash starts to die, as is the case today, and Apple offers you a lot of money, as one can assume happened here. The hire should be a huge boon for Apple, after losing some of the people once considered top talent within the company.